Talent Cloud Results Report

From Start-up to, well, some sort of Halfway Point

When planning the public release of Talent Cloud’s Minimal Viable Product (MVP) in 2018, the GC had just put in place the first cloud procurement vehicles for unclassified sites/information. Unclassified sites include public websites with no login, or any other collection of information. As soon as you need to collect anything - even names and emails - you need to be in a protected environment. And as an experimental staffing platform, we needed to collect a lot more than names.

In 2018, the process was underway to replicate the unclassified cloud procurement vehicle but for protected sites/information (up to the classification of Protected-B). This is really what we needed, but without a clear timeline we were looking for other options. Luckily government projects were provided with a route to request permission for collecting some of the least sensitive Protected data (referred to as Protected-A) on the unclassified cloud environment in the interim.

We were able to get approval for our site to go live in October 2018 at this “Protected-A” level.

While the solution at the Protected A level allowed us to run our platform and run several experiments, there were a few significant components of the project that we were unable to launch without access to a Protected B server solution. Talent Cloud has been working with the appropriate authorities since 2018 to secure access to a Protected B cloud server environment at Treasury Board Secretariat that would support the team’s open source code stack. This is now available, and Talent Cloud is in final stages of approvals and migration to this new Protected B cloud environment.

A Few Things Talent Cloud Planned, But Couldn’t Do Without a Protected B Server Environment

1. Collect employment equity (EE) information from users that volunteer it. This would help us more objectively determine if our bias reduction interventions were having the intended impact. This impacted the direction of our Bias Reduction work, and limited our ability to collect quantitative data to complement our qualitative analysis.
2. Capture assessment results of individuals going through a hiring process and provide them with a record of assessments they had passed. This impacted our ability to launch and use verifiable portable credentials as part of a searchable, interoperable talent repository.
3. Launch the Indigenous Talent Portal, built for (and designed by) Indigenous employees, which requires self-identification under an EE category. This impacted our ability to post jobs tailored for Indigenous applicants on the portal, and work with the community to develop and test bias reduction approaches.

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